How To Build A Website That Builds Your Business
Is Your Website Building Your Business?
Truth is for most businesses the answer is NO. The majority of business websites are electronic business cards. They list the company?s name, address information, phone number, fax number, a couple of tidbits about the business, and maybe some employee?s names with email addresses. The website is all about the business and not about the visitor, just like the standard business card. What usually happens to the business cards you collect?
Does Your Website Increase Your Sales?
Your website presents a major opportunity to build your business by increasing your sales. How? A visitor to your website is under no pressure, they are own their own turf and time. Now is the perfect time to educate them about their needs, address their needs, and then show them the way to meet their needs. Not only that, but your website must be setup and ready to allow the visitors (prospects) to make the next move when they are ready. What is that move? Your website must be ready to allow the prospect to contact you, not on your time, but on theirs. Make it easy for them.
How Can You Create a Business Building Website?
The key to a successful website is simple. It is just a series of steps, when properly implement will lead to results. Once the steps are completed, track your results, discover ways to improve, improve the website, and repeat. To make it easier for you, I have included a list of seven keys to get you started on your way to a successful business building website.
The Eleven Keys to a Successful Business Building Website
1. Choose a Good Domain Name
A good domain name is hard to find these days. If you?re lucky, you already secured one back when they were abundant. You have a few choices when choosing a domain name. You can choose one named after your product or service, one matching your business name, or one based on keywords and phrases that match your business.
I recommend sticking with domain names that end in ?.com? if at all possible. The next best choice would be a ?.net? or ?.org?. The best domain name for search engines would be one based on keywords related to your business. Another option is choosing a domain name with dashes between the words. I don?t recommend this if you plan on having people manually entering in the domain name to reach your site, although this type of domain name fares well in the search engines.
If no suitable domain names are available, then I recommend buying a previously owned domain name. There can be major advantages to buying an older domain name, especially regarding the search engines (older domains usually rank higher).
Search engines are important, but they are not the only option for driving traffic to your website. You can include your domain name on every item in your business. I would definitely include it on all advertisements, yellow pages, business cards, proposals, sales letters, stationary, and any other item that could possibly end up in a prospects line of site. The more exposure you bring to your domain name, the more potential traffic you will receive at your site.
Once you have selected a solid domain name, you will have to register it on the Internet so that it belongs to you. There are many places to accomplish this task, but I highly recommend GoDaddy. It will cost around $10 per year.
2. Create a Professional Website
Your website is a reflection of your business to the rest of the world. It may not be a true reflection but it is how the prospects will perceive you. A website does not have to be complicated or fancy to be effective, but it definitely has to be clear, clean, and easy to use.
I want to make a real, quick note here on the use of template sites. A template site is using a standard website that is used by multiple other companies. I highly advise any business that wants to stand-out from their competition avoid the use of template sites. Do you want to blend in with your competition or stand-out as something unique, different, and better?
A great looking website can easily be accomplished with good color choices that balance each other out. I recommend choosing no more than 3 colors for your website. Make sure the colors are not too bright. White is a good background choice, and black is a good font color choice. Do not make the mistake of reversing those.
A good web font for all text is imperative. It should be easy on the eyes, because you wouldn?t want your website visitor to give up reading about your business because of eye strain. One good font choice for the web is Verdana. Make sure to use no more than 2-3 fonts total throughout your website. Consistency is your friend.
Another nice addition to your website is business specific images. An image that can convey what your business does such as a chart or a picture of your product or service in use. There are many sources to purchase photos licensed for use on your website.
The prices for good photos are as low as $1 each. One website I use is IStockPhoto. You can search for photos, then purchase and download the photos you like. Adding great, relevant photography to your website will help it stand-out from your competition.
3. Make Your Website Easy to Navigate
A professional website is easy to use. This means having a standard navigation scheme which has a navigation bar either across the top or on the left or right side of the screen. I would also include a list of links across the bottom of the screen in the footer. I recommend viewing other professional websites in your industry, and sticking to the standard set forth by the best and easiest to use websites.
One rule of web navigation is that it should ideally never take your visitor more than 3-clicks to find any important information. The most important pages to link to are your company’s about page, a page with contact information and a contact form, a page with a sitemap that links to all the content on your website, and a home page focused on the benefits you provide your customers written from their point of view.
4. Test Your Website In Different Browsers
Your website should be viewable in the most popular browsers used on the Internet. Losing customers because they could not view your site in their desired browser is a fault of bad web design. The standard today is to design a website with a maximum width of 800 to 1024 pixels, and to make the website compatible with the 5 most popular browsers which are Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Safari (Mac).
5. A Clear, Focused, Marketing Message
A clear, focused, marketing message will be your strongest asset. A great marketing message will answer the question of what you do or sell, who you do it for, and how you do it. In order to be successful, you need to let the right people know you do things the right way, and be ready to back it up. If I go to your website, how will I know what you do unless you tell me? Why should I choose you over all the other competition out there? Highlight what the prospect will receive from a relationship with your organization above all else. Your website should have at least two times as many ?you? words than ?we, us, I? words.
Your marketing message is the focus of your website. Everything else on the website should back up your marketing message. If you focus on a specific target market or industry, the home page is the place to tell them with links to other web pages that back up your claims and educate the prospect as to why the should choose you. I always recommend collecting testimonials from past and current clients and then placing those testimonials throughout your website. Social proof is the strongest motivation for making a purchasing decision.
A website is a great place to include articles that you have written which educate the visitor and set you apart from the competition. When you educate, you set yourself up as expert in the prospect?s mind. When the prospect is ready to move forward, choosing you should be a natural decision. If you have a specific process that allows your organization to achieve consistent results, your website is the best place to discuss it in detail.
6. A Consistent Call-to-Action
You?ve got the prospect to your website, you?ve dazzled them with your knowledge and expertise, now what? The website visitor must be led through the process of how to do business with you. Your website must have a great offer, with no risk, that benefits the prospect, and a clear, consistent call-to-action for what they must to do to receive it.
An offer can be anything from a free evaluation, or a special report that educates them. It must be appealing to your prospects so they will want to take you up on the offer. Once you have presented the offer, tell them what to do. You can have a contact form on the home page that they can fill out to contact you, a call now prompt with your phone number next to it, or a link to your contact page.
Anything will work, as long as you offer multiple, easy ways to get in touch with you. This is no time to put up hurdles between your website visitor and your business, make it easy. I recommend including a contact form on every page, having a dedicated contact page, including your address on the home page, listing your phone number on every page, and listing your phone number at least 3 times on the home page.
A great offer will highlight 1-2 key benefits. Benefits are something the prospect will receive from the offer and is not a feature. One benefit would be having immediate access to an expert, while a feature would be having an expert assigned to your account. Benefits spell out what the prospect will receive from having the feature.
7. Choose a Reliable Website Host
Let?s assume you already have a domain name and a website. Now you will need a place to store your website so that it is accessible to others. This is known as a website host. There are companies on the Internet that offer a variety of website hosting services. Depending on your website?s needs and traffic, your web hosting will cost anywhere from $20 - $150 per month. I do not recommend using free or cheap web hosting services. This is definitely one area where you get what you pay for.
There are two basic types of web hosting: shared hosting and dedicated hosting. Shared hosting is a web host that places your website on a computer that contains many other websites. This can definitely affect your website?s performance if other websites are using up a lot of the computer?s resources and is the cheaper website hosting option. Dedicated hosting is when your website is the only website hosted on a computer. This is the best option but is also the most expensive. You would usually make this decision based on how much traffic your site gets.
8. Improve Your Websites Organic Search Results
Organic search results are your websites non-paid (purchased) search engine rankings. You improve your organic search results by doing everything possible, while following the search engine?s rules of behavior, to increase your website?s ranking. There are easy ways to get a higher ranking, and there are hard ways. The easiest way to at least get listed is to let the search engines know you exist.
The search engines scan the Internet on a regular basis, looking for new websites to add or ones to update in their database. The first thing every website must to is to let the search engines know you have a website. I recommend letting the 3 major search engines and 1 human edited search engine know. Here is the list with web addresses for each search engine to submit your website to (click on the links to go directly to the website submission page):
9. Optimize Your Website for The Search Engines
Before submitting your website to the search engine, make sure your website is optimized for your business? relevant keywords and phrases. Keyword research is discovering the best keywords for your website. This task is usually left to a professional, but can be done yourself if you put in the time to learn the necessary skills. One way to determine keywords is to study other competing websites ranking high in the search engines.
Your keywords and phrases will be terms relevant to your business such as Ocala Accountant. Once you have determined your search terms, you need to use them in your website content and especially in the page titles, document headers, and as the text used to link to your other web pages. These areas are given more importance by the search engines when determining rank.
There are few other technical techniques to make your website more search engine friendly. Some examples are avoiding flash intro pages, using CSS content formatting instead of tables, and staying away from frames.
10. Use Offline Advertising Methods to Increase Website Traffic
Another bit of advice is to use all your offline advertising to drive traffic to your website. Usually in offline advertising, space is a premium so you don?t have the opportunity to really engage your prospects. By directing your prospects to your website, you can have their full attention, and deliver your marketing message in a more complete fashion. The best way to increase sales is to leverage your website as the center of all your marketing activities.
11. Measure Results
Measure, measure, measure? You can never measure enough. Your website must have the capability to measure where traffic is coming from, where on your website are visitors going, what are visitors doing while at your website, and how much traffic your website is actually getting. If you are running online ad campaigns, measuring will be the difference between online success and online failure. How do you know if your website is successful? Easy, you will know by setting goals for your website, and measuring results, then constant improving it till you reach those goals.
In addition you can create special web pages, also known as landing pages, for each specific advertisement you run. Then you can track which advertisements caused the most visits to each web page. This will allow you to improve your advertisements so they pull more visitors thereby creating more leads in your sales funnel. This is the key method to link your offsite and online marketing activities together.
Adding the ability to track your website results is easy. Google offers free software that will allow you track results. The software can be found here. Once installed, you have to figure out how to use it, but Google provides useful documentation. Now you have the ability to track your website?s results, so there is no excuse for not improving your website and your business building results.
Now you are ready for website marketing success?
This covers the all eleven of the keys to creating a successful, business building website. If you are serious about making sure the above changes are implemented, feel free to share this document with your webmaster. If you do not have a webmaster or are in the market for a new one, I would like to extend an offer to you. I am offering you a FREE one hour website improvement consultation.
During this consultation we will discuss your current or desired web presence, or and lay out a plan. We will go over the above points in more depth, plus I will cover some material not included above. This will give you the opportunity to ask questions and receive answers from me. We will build a plan together, and you can implement yourself, hire another firm to do it, or we can discuss options with my company. You can contact me by using our Contact Form.
The above offer is free and there is no risk involved. If you are in business today, then you need a website. A website could greatly enhance your business? marketing efforts, allowing you to create trust with future customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.